Warning:
due to the gritty nature of "Fight Club", a high percentage of
its filming locations are found in urban areas that may have a high crime
rate, and could be dangerous to visit - particularly those in the less
reputable parts of downtown Los Angeles and Wilmington. Exercise reasonable
caution.

There is a scene
where Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter go to a restaurant, and the waiters
tell Ed that anything he orders will be free. That restaurant was a Clifton'sCafeteria
(as you can see from the name on the door
when they leave ), but it wasn't the well-known Clifton's (Brookdale)
cafeteria, on Broadway. Instead, it was a former Clifton's branch, called
"Clifton's Silver Spoon Cafeteria",
which was located at 515 W. 7th Street,
in downtown Los Angeles (about
a block northwest of the Hotel Bristol).

That branch closed in 1999, and the "Fight Club" producers used
the empty building to shoot those restaurant scenes with Ed and Helena.
That building is now vacant. (The original Clifton's Cafeteria,
two blocks to the the east, opened in 1935 and remains open for business.
You'll find it at at 648 S. Broadway.).
*

When they come
out of the Clifton's, there's a scene where Ed Norton
puts 'Marla' on a bus and tells her to
avoid the city for a while. This was shot on 8th Street,
near the corner of 8th Street & Broadway,
in downtown L.A.
In the background behind them, you can see marquee of the old (closed) Olympic
Theatre, which is located at 313 W. 8th Street.
and (farther in the distance) the Tower theatre,
at 802 S. Broadway.
When the bus pulls away, it is heading northwest up 8th Street.
*

Many of the film's
interior sets were shot at the new L.A.CenterStudios,
located just west of the Harbor Freeway in downtown
(the first movie studio to be built in the downtown area since the 1920's).

On the L.A. Center
Studios campus is the old UnocalBuilding,
at 1201W.5thStreet,
in downtown LosAngeles.
Back in 1995, when Unocal moved out of the building, developers had planned
to blow up the empty 12-story office building - for real (how's that for
art imitating life?). But they found it to be useful as a filming location,
and a new studio was born. In "Fight Club", they used it
as the police headquarters & offices,
where Ed Norton turns himself in (and where rogue cops try to castrate
him).

The final
scene, where they blow up all of the buildings,
isn't real. Oh, the buildings are real L.A. skyscrapers, but
the "skyline view", seen out the 'window' is fake. The actors
are just standing in front of a glass at the studio, and the "view"
is a studio composite of ten different buildings (mostly from Century City
and downtown Los Angeles), rearranged in a way that you'll never see them
in real life, using CGI effects to bring them down.

For instance:

In the film,
the last two buildings to fall are the twin Century
Plaza Towers, located behind 2000 Avenue of
the Stars in Century City.

To the left
of the twin towers (in this movie view view) is the nearby Fox Plaza
Tower at 2121 Avenue of
the Stars (which, by the way, was
also blown up in "Die Hard").

And to the right
of the twin towers (in this movie view) is the St.
Regis Hotel tower (next to the Century
Plaza Hotel), at 2055 Avenue of the
Stars.

In real life,
however, the Fox Tower is to the southwest of the twin towers,
while the St. Regis is west, directly across the street. Here is
a Google
map of the actual position of those three buildings at Century City:

* Locations
marked with an asterisk may be located in high-crime areas. Exercise reasonable
caution.

More Fight Club Locations!(Just click the arrow)

Some of the photos on this
page are stills from the DVD of "Fight Club"
(which you can buy by clicking
here) and are copyright 20th Century Fox .